


The Edge of a Shadow of a Doubt

by Cici_Nota



Series: In Which A Series Of Poor Decisions Leads To Consequences [4]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Being Lost, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, MacGuffins, Memory Loss, Search and Rescue
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-23
Updated: 2013-10-31
Packaged: 2017-12-30 07:03:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1015602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cici_Nota/pseuds/Cici_Nota
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Old rumors of a secretive group of Cybertronians hiding out in a dense nebula have come to light. Isn't it lucky that the Lost Light is right there to investigate?</p><p>Several scouting parties head out to see what they can see while the Lost Light itself charges through the middle of the uncharted expanse.</p><p>Of course one of the shuttles doesn't return.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Further tags will be added as the story gets written. Right now all I've got is the (very brief) prologue, up here mostly to encourage productivity.

The floor was much closer than it should have been. Since there was no reason for it to be hanging in midair, he stared at it for a moment. It stubbornly refused to shift. Dusty, scratched, marked with the edge of a footprint just barely within his field of vision, it was definitely a floor and it was just as definitely solidly in place.

_Wait._

The floor ran crazily off at right angles, opposite the footprint. Ah, that would make it a wall. He was pleased at the deduction for a few seconds, until something in his head shifted and the question of the moment became _Why am I lying on the floor?_

Motor relays were the answer, thoughts coming clearer as more of his central processor came online. The boot sequence wasn't running anywhere near optimal, stalling out around several inexplicable sections and parts of it dead-ending entirely. His motor relays hadn't been activated.

Control over his optics came back first, and with it he managed to get a slightly clearer picture of his surroundings. He was face down in what was either a wide corridor or a very narrow room, ancient dust marked with recent footprints. He counted at least three different sets, possibly more. It was hard to tell.

His boot sequence finally finished, and he flexed his hands before trying to climb back to his feet. His fingers rang oddly against the floor, and the light bouncing off the floor kept making him dizzy. He shuttered his optics long enough to pull himself to his feet without the help of visual input.

Once the world stopped tilting - or at least his gyros insisted that it was - and his tanks stopped roiling, he unshuttered his optics again and carefully looked around.

The space he was in appeared to be a short corridor, he noted, doors on either side tightly shut while all of those running down the length of the hallway were either cracked open or hanging off the hinges in ruins. Every open doorway was shadow-filled and all but opaque.

"That's so not encouraging," he said.

There was no indication as to how he'd ended up face-down in what was clearly an abandoned hallway; no signs of a struggle and no part of his frame felt damaged. He still felt that someone - or something - needed punched to redress the grievous wrong done to him, but that meant finding someone else.

"Hey!" he shouted, voice curiously muffled.  There was no resonance in the hallway at all, no echo even from behind the partially open doors. He chose one at random, breaking down its already splintered pieces.  "Show yourself!"

Still nothing echoed back, and he began to feel a sense of claustrophobia. The ceiling, when he looked up, was far too close to the ground - close enough that he could have reached out and touched it.

"Hey!" he shouted again, picking an end of the hallway at random and stalking toward it.  The door he'd chosen was locked and refused to open when he pushed. Something about the opening mechanism seemed off, but he couldn't place it, and either way it was still impassable without more effort than he wanted to expend on it. "Rust-brained spawn of a glitch," he spat at it for good measure, and went to try the other door.

The second door swung open easily, overhead lights flickering on as he entered the room. It was a much wider space, something about it giving the impression of a waiting room. What furniture was left was cracked with age, and the walls were dull and pitted. Something about them seemed almost familiar for a moment, but he couldn't pin down the memory. He dismissed it as unimportant.

At least the ceiling here was higher, but there were no windows in the hexagonal space. There was a double door in one of the walls at an angle to where he'd come out, but it too was solidly closed.

He prowled around the room, looking for signs that someone had been there.  The same footprints he'd seen in the corridor showed up again, looping back and forth across the floor in a tangled mess until it was impossible to tell where they'd come from or where they were going.

As he approached the fifth door, it slid noiselessly open.  He froze in front of it, staring into the dark corridor with his hands raised defensively. Or maybe it was offensively. _The best defense is a good offense_ ran through his mind, and he shook his head. Down the corridor, he could hear a rhythmic whir followed by a thump, the two sounds repeating over and over again.

He flicked his optics to infra-red, not really noticing what he was doing. The corridor sprang to life around him in cool blues and cold blacks - there was very little ambient heat. He himself was surrounded by an orange fog as heat streamed out from under his plating. His systems revved a little higher, extra energy going to his motor relays.

There was something on the ground at the end of the corridor - a longer corridor than the one he'd woken in - glowing the bright warm colors of life. He could make out limbs but no head, which didn't make sense until he realized that its feet were toward him and its head (unless the head was gone entirely) was hidden behind the cooling effects of a wall.

The whirring thump was another automatic door trying to close and running into what he could now see was a body. It thumped against the lateral plating and retreated back into the wall.

"Heh," he said, a little chuckle escaping.  It was kind of funny, really. At the sound of his voice, bright lights flickered on overhead.  He hastily switched his optics back to normal and was greeted with the sight of damaged red plating. The mech was tall even lying down, big feet twitching every time the door hit his side.

This time, a new sound entered the rhythm - the mech groaned as his damaged plating was struck again, fingers scrabbling in the dust. It was even funnier now that the mech was trying to get away from the door with his motor relays obviously still scrambled, but eventually it stopped being quite so hilarious and got boring.

He stood in front of the door, casually holding it open as the mech's optics flickered to life.  The mech looked up and finally got his limbs to work in a coherent fashion. He appeared to celebrate his newfound mobility by flailing around and finally scrambling backward down the hall.

The red mech's mouth worked. "Who the hell are you?" he finally said. "And what happened to your face?"

"What?" he blinked, only then realizing the odd flatness of his visual field. All of his input was coming from a single source, instead of the standard two, and his central processor was performing extra calibrations to allow for the reduced amount of data.

"And your hands?" the red mech continued, finding the wall with his back and using it to push himself shakily to his feet.

He held up his hands, really seeing them for the first time. He didn't have standard fingers, either. He had claws - good for fighting, he though distantly, and also the bizarre appendages explained why manipulating objects had felt so strange.

The fact that he had claws for hands did not explain why they felt normal.  Not natural, but as if he'd been using them for so long that they'd become second nature. "How the slag should I know?" he said, suddenly angry about the loss of his hands.

"You mean you don't know who you are?" the red mech asked.

"Of course I..." His vocalizer stalled out as he realized that he did not, in fact, know his designation. "Wait."

None of his memories were accessible; he didn't know his name, age, where he was from, much less where he was now and how he'd gotten there. His entire life was a complete blank. The dawning look of horror on the red mech's face must have mirrored his own, he thought distantly in the one corner of his mind not paralyzed with shock. 


	2. Drift

_14 days until the destruction of the shuttle Light Bringer  
_ “And that’s the Leading Light,” Blaster said, twisting around in his chair.

“Of course Magnus is the last one in.” Rodimus hopped to his feet. “What with the being thorough. Always thorough. Very attentive to details. And punctual.” He glanced down at the datapads containing preliminary reports from the other shuttles, clearly considering just handing them off to Ultra Magnus. “Ask him to –“

“Actually,” Drift interrupted, and Rodimus twitched. “The Leading Light isn’t the last one in,” Drift continued, peering over Blaster’s shoulder. “The Light Bringer hasn’t arrived yet.”

“What, really?” Rodimus bounded across the bridge – not that there was really enough room to move quite so energetically – and leaned across Drift. “Huh. Well, they haven’t technically missed the rendezvous yet.”

“Unless they show up within the next thirty seconds, the Light Bringer is late,” Drift said. Rodimus twitched again, probably at what he perceived to be blatant insubordination. Drift ignored it.

The three of them stared at the display for approximately thirty seconds, which did not produce the missing shuttle.

“Okay, now they’re late,” Rodimus said finally. “I’m sure they’re fine. We should give them some time. Where were they headed?”

Another few taps at the display gave Blaster the answer. “They were supposed to head through sectors 15-17.”

“Did we see anything unusual over there?” Rodimus asked.

“Not on the initial scan,” Blaster said. “The nebula’s not as dense, but there are some odd magnetics that make it harder to see.”

“Okay.” Rodimus drummed his fingers on the nearest surface. “I’m giving them another day to show up. If they’re not here by then, we go in and get them.”

Drift bit down on his instinctive response, which was to grab Rodimus by his ridiculous spoiler and shake him until he went back into the nebula to search for the final scouting party. He hadn’t been particularly pleased with the idea of sending shuttlecraft out to verify old and unreliable reports of potentially hostile Cybertronian activity, but he’d been overruled. The nebula allegedly hiding said activity was huge and dense, and using the shuttlecraft took a lot less patience than combing through the entire area with the Lost Light’s sensors alone.

“What’s the crew manifest for the Light Bringer?” Rodimus asked.

“Deftwing, Inferno, Hound, Whirl, and Ratchet,” Blaster read off.

Drift bit his tongue, catching it between his teeth to stop himself from speaking. The crew members chosen for the scouting parties had left him even more ill at ease with the entire idea, and now he’d been vindicated; Ratchet was missing, and Drift wasn’t there. Rodimus gave him a sideways look and visibly made a decision.

“Drift, please debrief Ultra Magnus and then deliver these to him.” Rodimus shoved the datapads into Drift’s hands, letting go suddenly enough that Drift nearly dropped them altogether. “I’d like the two of you to go over the preliminary reports and highlight any areas that might be of interest.” He clapped a hand on Drift’s shoulder. “I’m not expecting anything obvious or someone would have said something by now, but see what the two of you turn up.”

For half a second, all Drift could do was stare, his jaw starting to fall open. Rodimus couldn’t be serious; aside from the issue of the missing shuttle, he didn’t get along with Ultra Magnus in close quarters at all – not that he disliked the mech, but he was so distressingly rigid. The fact that Drift could almost hear him read off a list of Deadlock’s war crimes every time Ultra Magnus looked at him didn’t help.

Rodimus was making what Swerve called his “authority figure face,” though, which meant he wasn’t going to be swayed by protests and would probably pitch a fit if Drift made one. Drift snapped his mouth closed again, forgetting where his tongue was, and accidentally bit down on it. He yelped slightly at the unexpected pain, causing Rodimus to give him a rather disapproving look.

“Right away,” he said, lisping slightly, and took the datapads and their two weeks’ worth of information down to greet the Leading Light. It wasn’t until after Ultra Magnus had driven him nearly mad with attention to grammatical detail rather than the content of the datapads that Drift realized Rodimus had thoroughly distracted him from worrying about Ratchet.

As distractions went, it was actually pretty reasonable. The nebula had until now been thoroughly uncharted; it was far enough out of the way of any of the civil war’s front lines – and with nothing particularly interesting apparently in it – that its location had more or less been noted by both sides and then completely ignored.

Rodimus, however, had heard from somewhere a story about a secretive group of Cybertronians setting up shop somewhere inside the difficult-to-scan region, and had decided that it could potentially be the Knights of Cybertron.

“They can’t possibly be out here,” Drift had told him, to which Rodimus had said that no one knew where the Knights were, and if they didn’t want to be found, what better place to hide?

Ultra Magnus had pointed out, quite reasonably, that the peculiar nature of the gases in this particular nebula – dense to begin with, far more so than the bog standard run of the mill nebula – would make navigating it particularly treacherous, and searching it properly would take months.

Rodimus’ reaction to that had been more along the lines of horror at the prospect of boredom than anything reasonable, but he’d come up with a constructive solution.

“We’ve got shuttles,” he’d said. “Shuttles have sensors. We’ll make a mission out of it!”

Drift had had the pleasure of seeing Ultra Magnus twitch visibly at that one, but even he couldn’t deny that dividing the nebula into sectors and sending out several teams to investigate assigned areas was a rather efficient way of gathering a lot of information in a much shorter time.

Drift’s turn to get twitchy came when Ratchet insisted on joining one of the scout parties, and then Rodimus refused to assign him to the same one.

“Stop hovering,” Ratchet had said, and then, “Stop panicking.”

He would have been more convincing if he hadn’t still had glaringly recent weld scars that Drift knew perfectly well went right across his spark chamber.

“And stop looking at my chest,” Ratchet had added.

“I don’t like the idea of you going out there alone,” Drift had said.

“One, I won’t be,” Ratchet had replied, raising an optic ridge. “There are four other Autobots on the manifest. Two, the overprotective jealous thing isn’t pretty.”

There hadn’t really been an answer Drift could give to that without further embodying the accusation of overprotective and jealous, which he knew intellectually was a perfectly reasonable assessment of his objections, but on the other hand, Ratchet had only just recovered from a fight with a Decepticon and a really big gun. Cracked spark chambers were nothing to take lightly.

“You’re not paying attention,” Ultra Magnus said, and Drift came back to himself with a start.

“Sorry,” he said.

Ultra Magnus’ optics narrowed. “I believe it would be beneficial to continue this at a later time,” he said. “Your performance is clearly not optimal.”

“Uh.” Drift tried to work out if he’d been insulted or not, and gave it up as unimportant. “Later sounds good.”

A query to the bridge told him that the Light Bringer still hadn’t shown up for the rendezvous, and a ping to Rodimus was answered with a sharp order to recharge. Drift didn’t think Rodimus would actually have Ultra Magnus throw him in the brig for insubordination, but he tried to follow the order anyway.

 _13 days until the destruction of the shuttle Light Bringer  
_ “We’re going back in,” Rodimus said as soon as Drift entered the bridge. “The Light Bringer is still missing.”

 “Of course it is,” Drift muttered subvocally. “Standard search pattern?”

The standard search pattern wasn’t actually the most effective way of covering a great deal of ground quickly; it assumed enemy combatants in the area and its trajectory was modified accordingly. Drift hadn’t actually meant standard and was assuming civilian; it was just that the words slipped off the tongue so easily after such a long war.

“Although no other teams found any trace of hostile activity, I recommend the standard search pattern.” Surprisingly, that was Ultra Magnus, standing in what was almost a relaxed pose.

“I meant –“ Drift started. A standard search pattern could take far too long, although he didn’t want to dwell on what ‘too long’ could mean.

“No, a standard pattern.” Rodimus looked at him thoughtfully. “If they’ve run into trouble, I’d rather have the element of surprise.”

“Let me take the Leading Light in a civilian pattern as a distraction.” Drift had one hand on the blade hanging at his hip, completely unconscious of the gesture. “Any hostiles will head for me first.”

That sparked a discussion on whether or not splitting forces was a good idea – the Light Bringer had fallen completely off the map, with no comm chatter, no signals, nothing. While it was unknown whether that meant it had been destroyed or whether something was interfering with the crew’s ability to speak to the Lost Light, Rodimus felt the crew would fare better if all their firepower was concentrated together.

“And if our initial force needs backup?” Ultra Magnus asked, looking rather put out to be agreeing with Drift.

Rodimus eyed him askance. “You know, I could almost think you were agreeing on something just to make it more convincing. Since you two fight about literally everything.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ultra Magnus said over the top of Drift’s much less coherent protest.

“Besides,” Rodimus continued, as if he hadn’t just blithely accused his second and third in command of perpetuating an entirely bizarre conspiracy and then just as lightly dismissed the notion, “the Lost Light has better armament and weaponry than all of the shuttles. Combined.” He grimaced slightly. “So much for a neutral ship.”

The nebula was stunning when seen from afar – colors swirling around each other in a contrasting elongated sphere, edges sharply drawn against the backdrop of emptier space. Closer, it appeared much less defined. The Lost Light slipped into the edges, the sensors becoming less and less effective until it seemed almost normal that they were running nearly blind.

“Sector 17,” Blaster said unnecessarily.

Drift knew it was his imagination, but the bridge seemed quieter than usual, as if all sound had been muffled by the haze outside. He thought he could hear the deckplates creaking under the pressure that he knew was negligible but that seemed to press down against the hull, and even the vibrations of the engine seemed muted.

“Running silent,” Blaster added.

Drift stood ramrod straight, willing nothing to show on his face.

“Okay, everybody, you know where to go,” Rodimus said. “Drift, off the bridge. You’re not going to do any good moping around here.”

“I’m not _moping_ ,” Drift said, but he went.

The oil reservoir was dimly lit, the light of the stars blotted out by the swirling fog of the nebula and the flickering interior lights doing nothing to combat the gloom. Drift stared at the windows, at the colorless gases outside rushing up against the transparent panels in clouds of nothing, and tried not to think of ways that the Light Bringer could have met an unseemly demise.

Every so often the mists spun into barely visible shapes, and more than once Drift found himself all but plastered against a window in an effort to see through the murky depths.  “This is ridiculous,” he growled the third time something that looked like the clean lines of a shuttle fell apart into almost organically bulging curves and dissipated entirely.

“What is?” came from behind him, and Drift just barely managed not to cling to the ceiling.

“Skids,” he managed.

The theoretician gave him a twisted half-smile. “You didn’t answer,” he said.

“This.” Drift waved a hand toward the fog outside. “I keep thinking I see… things.”

“Well,” Skids said. “It’s a well-known fact that monsters live in nebulae.”

For a moment, Drift could only stare. “No, it isn’t,” he said finally, wondering if Skids had unearthed a sense of humor or if he were perhaps entirely serious.

“A mech can always hope,” Skids returned. “Personally, I’ve always wanted to meet a giant snake.”

That caught Drift off-guard again, but this time he started laughing, and Skids laughed with him, and some of the horror of the uncertainty lightened a little bit.

 _10 days until the destruction of the shuttle Light Bringer  
_ The slow pace of the search was starting to drive Drift mad; the Lost Light had barely made it through Sector 17, and it had yet to find anything actually useful. Magnetic resonance gave rise to endless sensor ghosts, until Mainframe calibrated the instruments to compensate, which only cut the instances of false readings by perhaps half.

“Taking the Leading Light out to the edge of sensor range and filtering the two sets of data together would give us a more accurate impression,” Mainframe said finally, when a rock the size of a minibot registered as a warship.

“Yes, yes, do it,” Rodimus said, boredom having gotten the better of his earlier objections. “Magnus, pick your crew.”

Drift, by virtue of mute glaring, managed to make his way on board the Leading Light. Still without speaking, he took the place at the helm and prepared to move the shuttle out.

 _8 days until the destruction of the shuttle Light Bringer  
_ If anything, the echo from the Lost Light in a sea of translucent fog made the eerie impression worse. The Lost Light itself ghosted off the port bow, only occasionally within visual range when the banks drifted apart. It registered clearly on sensors, at least, but the fraction-second delay before the scans came clear gave Drift the sensation of being just slightly out of phase with his surroundings every time he took a shift at the helm.

“There are no records of this? At all?” Drift asked Rewind when the minibot meandered over to the helm and peered at the displays. The Leading Light was just about to enter Sector 16, with the Lost Light trailing behind in a sweeping pattern.

“Just the ones Rodimus cited to come in here,” Rewind said, which wasn’t really an answer at all. Rumors and records were far from the same thing. “Although,” he added thoughtfully, tapping his faceplate with a single finger, “there’s quite a bit of footage from nebula with similar characteristics.”

“Oh?” Drift asked, optics caught by another sensor ghost. This one was registering as an asteroid the size of a small planet, the elements in its crust throwing off radiation in high enough quantities to give the surface a rippling effect.

“Mostly people tended to go around,” Rewind said. “It’s a rather inimical environment.”

“Mostly?” Drift repeated, still looking at the sensor ghost. It wasn’t resolving.

“Every so often –“ Rewind started, and then Drift realized that the object in front of the Leading Light was not, in fact, a sensor ghost, and they were still on a collision course.

“Drift,” Ultra Magnus snapped from behind him, but Drift’s fingers were already moving steadily across the controls.

“I’m on it,” he said absently, and the Leading Light settled into a low orbit around the first solid object they’d found in the nebula larger than a minibot.

The Lost Light remained on the edge of the Leading Light’s sensor capabilities, hovering out of range of whatever might be on the surface.

“It looks promising, doesn’t it,” Rodimus said, hopping out of the smaller shuttle he’d crammed into the back of the Leading Light. He hadn’t wanted open lines of communication that could potentially be heard by anyone hostile, which Drift felt made sense, but he’d also opted to leave the bulk of the crew back on the Lost Light, about which Drift was less happy. On the other hand, they had Ultra Magnus; unless they were looking at a Phase Sixer, they were probably in pretty good shape. “If there’s anything in here, it’s probably down there.”

“If only because that’s the only tangible thing in here, yes.” Ultra Magnus was wearing his angrier second expression, mouth downturned in dissatisfaction.

“Lighten up,” Rodimus was saying, and Drift clenched his hands into fists. The Lost Light was missing people, and Rodimus was treating it as some sort of game. “Okay, let’s get this out of the way and we can head down.”

“With all due respect,” Ultra Magnus began, and Rodimus sighed audibly.

“You’re going to tell me we should assess the situation first,” he said, a resigned note in his voice. “Aren’t you.”

“He’s right,” Drift said, and Ultra Magnus threw up his hands before stalking back to the helm.

“Both of you?” Rodimus said, and followed Ultra Magnus.

“The radiation on the surface has made it difficult to get any clear readings,” Ultra Magnus was saying as Drift finally unclenched his hands and joined his superior officers.

“It’s a lot of ground to cover,” Rodimus said, sounding as if was agreeing with something else. “Is the radiation harmful?”

Ultra Magnus cocked his head to the side, and First Aid stepped forward. Drift hadn’t noticed him lurking behind the SiC, all but hidden. “I don’t think so,” he said. “At least, not at first.”

“Not at first?” Rodimus asked.

“I can’t be entirely sure,” First Aid said. “The levels are fluctuating too much to get anything definite.”

“So the million-shanix question is whether or not our people are down there.” Rodimus rubbed his hands together.  “Smokescreen, set us down next to the MARB.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On hiatus for NaNoWriMo. <3 Wish me luck.


End file.
